Oct 2018: Co-organized a coding sprint with
Princeton University for our DARPA POSH project including
a PyMTL
tutorial and collaborative hacking on our on-chip network
generator

Sep 2018: Paper on PyMTL as an open-source
Python-based hardware generation, simulation, and verification
framework was accepted to
the First
Workshop on Open-Source EDA Technology (WOSET'18) to be held in
conjunction with ICCAD-37

Jul 2018: Software and hardware
infrastructure originally developed for
CURIE Academy 2014
was adapted by Zhiru Zhang
for CATALYST
Academy 2018 as part of the educational outreach initiatives
funded through various National Science Foundation (NSF) grants

Jul 2018: Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) proposal to develop HammerBlade, a platform
for continuous synthesis of polymorphic hardware and software (with
our collaborators Prof. Zhiru Zhang and Adrian Sampson at Cornell
University and Prof. Michael Taylor, Luis Ceze, and Mark Oskin at the
University of Washington) is funded as part of the DARPA
Software-Defined Hardware (SDH) program within the
new Electronics
Resurgence Initiative (ERI)

May 2018: Paper on
the Celerity
system-on-chip architecture and design methodology (in
collaboration with our colleagues at the University of Washington, UC
San Diego, University of Michigan, and Cornell) published in
IEEE Micro.
Celerity was one of six systems selected out of HOTCHIPS'17 for
inclusion in this issue, and it was the only academic chip!

Oct 2017: Research group alumni are
contributing to Google's recent push into building full-custom
hardware. Derek Lockhart, PhD'15, was a part of the team that
developed
Google's Cloud
Tensor Processing Unit for accelerating machine learning in the
data center. Ji Kim, PhD'16, was a part of the team that developed
Google's Pixel
Visual Core System-on-Chip for accelerating image processing in
the Pixel 2 smartphone.

May 2017: Ian Thompson, Mohammad Dohadwala,
James Talmage, and Baturay Turkmen successfully completed their MEng
design projects and graduated. Ian is heading to Green Hills
Software, Mohammad is heading to Hyperloop, James is heading to
Cavium, and Turkmen is heading to Intel – Congratulations!

May 2017: Taped out the Celerity
system-on-chip: a 5x5mm 385M-transistor chip in TSMC 16nm designed
and implemented by a large team of over 20 students and faculty from
UC San Diego, University of Michigan, and Cornell as part of
the DARPA
Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program. The
chip includes a fully synthesizable PLL, digital LDO, five modified
Chisel-generated RISC-V Rocket cores, a 496-core RISC-V tiled
manycore processor, tightly integrated Rocket-to-manycore
communication channels, complex HLS-generated BNN (binarized neural
network) accelerator, manycore-to-BNN high-speed links, sleep-mode
10-core manycore, top-level bus interconnect, high-speed
source-synchronous off-chip I/O, and a custom flip-chip package.
Cornell led the Rocket+BNN accelerator logical/physical design and
also made key contributions to the top-level logical/physical
integration and design/verification methodology.

Mar 2017: Research group moved to the new
home of the Computer Systems
Laboratory
in 471 Rhodes
Hall. The space was designed
by LEVENBETTS, a leading
architecture firm from NYC, to facilitate a sense of community,
encourage collaboration, support healthy living, and balance the
multi-dimensional aspect of academia. The space includes new Ph.D.
offices, lounge space, breakout rooms, and a state-of-the-art
hardware prototyping research lab.

Jun 2016: Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) proposal to develop a synthesis methodology
for accelerator-centric SOCs and toolflows (with our collaborator
Prof. Zhiru Zhang and many others from UCSD, UCLA, and Michigan) is
funded as part of the
DARPA
Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program

Jun 2016: Berkin Ilbeyi attends
the Virtual Machines
Summer School (VMSS) at the Cumberland Lodge, UK to learn more
about JIT compilation for dynamic programming languages

May 2016: Wei Geng, Jason Setter, Taylor
Pritchard, Nagaraj Murali, and Bharath Sudheendra successfully
completed their MEng design projects and graduated. Wei and Taylor
are heading to IBM, Jason is heading to Oracle, Nagaraj is heading to
NVIDIA, and Bharath is heading to Intel – Congratulations!

Jul 2014: Directed the week-long design
experience for CURIE Academy 2014
entitled "Exploring an
Internet of Things" as part of the educational outreach
initiatives funded through National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER
grant

Jul 2013: Developed and led the ECE module
within
the ENGRG
1060 Explorations in Engineering summer course targeted towards
high school students; module included
a guest lecture on
Electrical and Computer Engineering and a lab session using
Arduino-based mini-robots

Jul 2013: Visited the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) in Arlington, VA to share recent research results

2012

Dec 2012: Christopher Torng has been
selected as
a Qualcomm
Innovation Fellowship finalist along with fellow graduate student
Wacek Godycki; they will present their proposal on reconfigurable
power distribution networks this spring as part of the final
selection process – Congratulations!

Oct 2012: Christopher Torng and Berkin
Ilbeyi joined the Batten Research Group – Welcome!

Jul 2012: Developed and led the ECE module
within
the ENGRG
1060 Explorations in Engineering summer course targeted towards
high school students; module included
a guest lecture on
Electrical and Computer Engineering and a lab session using
Arduino-based mini-robots

Aug 2011: Book chapter on designing
chip-level nanophotonic interconnection networks (written with our
collaborators at UC Berkeley and MIT) will be included in the
forthcoming book "Integrated Optical Interconnect Architectures and
Applications in Embedded Systems" to be published by Springer

May 2011: Abhishek Aggarwal and Tejas Sapre
successfully completed their MEng design projects, graduated, and are
both heading to Intel. Yiran Yan also successfully completed his MEng
design project and is graduating this Fall – Congratulations!